When Eliza Clark’s debut novel, Boy Parts, came out in the summer of 2020, it almost slipped under the radar. But before long, the buzz on TikTok catapulted the book into cult status. Since then, there has been a one-woman stage adaptation at the Soho theatre and her follow-up, Penance, about a journalist investigating a gruesome true-crime story set on the date of the Brexit referendum, is being adapted by Juno Dawson for television. Now 30, last year she was named one of Granta’s best young British novelists.
Julia Armfield, 34, has attracted a devoted following with her gothic, horror-inflected books, lyrical language and aquatic imagery. Her 2019 debut short-story collection, Salt Slow, was as thrillingly macabre as you might expect from someone who wrote their MA dissertation on teeth, hair and nails in the Victorian imagination. Her haunting 2022 debut novel, Our Wives Under the Sea, was shortlisted for the Foyles fiction book of the year award and won the 2023 Polari book prize. Both authors are publishing their third books this year. Clark’s wide-ranging story collection, She’s Always Hungry, takes her back to her speculative fiction beginnings: readers may be surprised by the amount of spaceship content (it’s excellent). Armfield’s evocative second novel, Private Rites, reimagines King Lear in an apocalyptic future in which three sisters quarrel as the world is submerged.
